Officer Health, Stress, and Suicide

Voiceover

00:00

Welcome to The Beat—a podcast series from the COPS Office at the Department of Justice. Featuring 

interviews with experts from a varied field of disciplines, The Beat provides law enforcement with the 

latest developments and trending topics in community policing.

Jennifer Donelan

00:16

I'm your host, Jennifer Donelan, and today we’ll hear from Dr. John Violanti. He is a retired New York 

State police trooper and he's also a research professor at the University of Buffalo SUNY. We’re glad 

you’re here. The topic today we're discussing is Officer Suicide. Give us a brief description or explanation 

of how you're approaching officer suicide and your personal interest in this topic.

Dr. John Violanti

00:40

Oh, sure. I think initially my interest started when I was a police officer and I had witnessed several of 

my comrades commit suicide or die by suicide and it kind of piqued my interest on what the association 

was between the work of being a police officer and getting to a point where you no longer want to live.

Donelan

01:03

Yes, it is and of course we understand your interest in the topic. What is your role as a research 

professor at the University of Buffalo on this topic?

Violanti

01:13

My role is I'm a research professor and essentially what I do is conduct research, epidemiological 

research on police health, police stress, and suicide. So, our role again is to find out what the scope of 

this problem is throughout our country, and once we do that, to determine the best sort of prevention 

strategies that departments can use. That's going to help in the long run. And it's a long time and 

coming. It's only recently that we'd become more aware of the mental strain placed on our police 

officers in this country and it's starting to take its toll.

Donelan

01:54

What are some examples that you found in your research of this mental strain or issues that are causing 

officers to consider as well as commit suicide?
Violanti

02:04

Well, we found for example that there's a high degree of depressive symptoms among police that we 

interview. We give them measures for depression and we find that their scores are generally higher than 

those that we see in the general population. We see correlates of hopelessness among officers where 

the fact that they're doing a job and nothing's happening, there's no change and things are getting 

worse, so they have no effect. Because they go out every day and risk their lives, there doesn't seem to 

be any effect or any appreciation of that by the general public. So, this has become very demoralizing 

and many officers are hurt by this. And so, they just feel that they no longer want to invest their risking 

their lives for doing the job. The stress they see, the trauma that they see, all of these things are 

affecting them psychologically. And the thing with stress is that it's a cumulative process and the more 

they see, the more trauma and more stress they see, the worse things get. They get to a point where 

they can't cope with it anymore. Some may move to substance abuse, some may move to depression, 

and some may decide that ultimately they want to die by suicide.

Donelan

03:41

And just the day to day of being a law enforcement officer, going out every day and not knowing what 

may happen and that literally your life is on the line regardless of whether you're a beat officer or even 

someone that just works inside the office. I guess in this modern age that we live now with viral video 

and everyone having a broadcast device on their person must play some role in the stress or the scrutiny 

that officer’s feel. Can you expand on what your studies have shown, how things in times and 

circumstance as recent as 10 years ago must be different than they are today?

Violanti

04:17

Oh, certainly. Ten years ago as you mentioned we don't have the technology for videos and cameras and 

cell phones. I mean if you think about this, if you go to work every day and somebody's videotaping you 

with a camera while you work eight hours a day, it's got to be pretty stressful because you have to 

watch every single move that you make, and any move that an officer makes can be determined as the 

wrong move. Many people in society don't understand the laws of the use of force and what looks like

an excessive use of force in one situation may be one that's allowed by law. But to the public, it doesn't 

look that way so the officer is scrutinized for that and he's brought in for internal investigations and so 

forth. So, the cameras can be a real deficit but on the other side of that, the cameras can be a plus 

because they can exonerate an officer from an action that he or she has taken.

The thing we find from our data on police health is that stress can affect you not only psychologically but 

it can affect you physically as well. And officers who have a lot of chronic stress also have indications of 

heart disease or cardiovascular disease. We measure this in our clinic. We can measure artery health.

We can measure the possibility of diabetes and many physical ailments. And when we look at this and 

we look at the stress that officers have, we see associations going on. The more stress, the more likely 

there are going to be physical ailments as well. There is research out there now that says stress is 
actually—and trauma that officers experience—actually can affect the physiology of the brain, can affect 

decision-making out in the street. So, a lot of these things add up to a difficult job that has chronic 

stress, that has people in it who are psychologically hurt and has people in it that are becoming 

physically hurt because of the stress they experience.

Donelan

06:34

So, what is preventing an officer from saying, "This is stressful. I’m just going to work at Target"? Why do 

they continue with this line of work? What is it within a police officer that causes them just to keep 

going with employment that might eventually be detrimental to their psychological and physical health?

Violanti

06:55

When we test officers to come out into police work with psychological testing, we find that they there—

they think this is a helping profession, so they're here to help people. And as the years go on, that kind 

of dissipates a little bit when they really see what's going on out there. But to some degree, despite the 

stress, many of them, they are resilient people and they stay in the career because they think there’s 

sometime and somewhere there's one incident that saves them from all this. Maybe they've done 

something heroic like rescue a baby or someone from a burning car or save someone's life by using CPR 

or done something good. And those are the things that carry them on, the fact they contributed in some 

way.

Donelan

07:47

Okay, I would assume just as a layperson that if their stress level is like at this, eight out of 10 area that 

they might have these good things that will abate that eight out of 10 for a while. If their stress then 

happens again, it doesn't restart at zero. It's still up there near that eight level. Am I correct as a 

layperson in understanding how that stress can affect a person?

Violanti

08:10

Yes, it can. And as I mentioned before, it's a cumulative process and the body keeps score, and after a 

while it gets to the deterioration point. But what we're afraid of is that when they retire, that the 

vestiges of these problems are going to follow them into retirement.

Donelan

08:30

So, for the research that you're doing right now, take us a little bit into that.

Violanti

08:33

What we do right now is we're involved with the Centers for Disease Control. We're using their data to 

look at suicide rates. What we do basically is compare the suicide rate of police officers to that of the 
general United States' population and we see if there's any difference, and there is. I think we looked at 

one three-year period and there were an average of 90 police suicides per year over that three-year 

period. If you equate that to what epidemiologists do, we talk in terms of risk—if you look at the risk 

factor, a police officer by virtue of their occupation has a 69 percent greater risk of dying by suicide than 

does a worker in the general population. So, it's a staggering statistic and it's scary because the job you 

work may be a risk factor for suicide.

Donelan

09:37

And with this data you're gathering, what’s your end goal with the data, getting it out and trying to 

make effective change, I guess helping reduce officer suicide?

Violanti

09:46

Policing is an occupation that's not only dangerous in the street, it's psychologically dangerous and you 

need to provide some services to help them deal with this. Services like psychologists, there are plenty 

of police psychologists out there now in many of the departments that help. Services like peer support 

groups. Peer support works very well because it's officers talking to officers and they have a better 

understanding of the job, and a lot of officers like using peer support when they have a problem. One of 

the biggest problems I think in getting officers to get help is the stigma of mental health problems. You 

know, it's okay to go to the doctor if you have a broken arm and maybe the guys will come in and they'll 

sign the cast on your arm. If you go to a psychologist because you're depressed or because you have 

suicidal tendencies and you come back to work, nobody's going to sign your cast, nobody's going to talk 

to you because of the stigma associated with mental health. There's not an understanding in our society 

and in policing that mental health is really just the same thing as physical health, it's in a different 

domain.

Donelan

11:15

So, I assume that our listeners, if they want more information on the work that you're doing or this topic 

are free to contact you?

Violanti

11:23

Sure.

Donelan

11:24

Fantastic. And that would be V-I-O-L-A-N-T-I @buffalo.edu. And if there's one thought that you could 

have our listeners think about as we close this podcast today, what would you want them to leave with?
Violanti

11:37

Well, if I were an officer who was having problems, suffering from depression and problems with the 

job, I think the best advice I could ever tell you is go get some help. Don't be afraid to be afraid. Get 

help. No one's going to hurt you if you do this. If you have a leader that understands the situation in 

which we're hoping leaders are trying to understand it, we may save your life. Or if you're a buddy of an 

officer who you see in that officer something going on, say something. Do something, say something.

Help him get through it. He may thank you for validating his feelings and he may thank you for getting 

him to go somewhere to get some help.

Donelan

12:30

Thank you so much, sir, for appearing on The Beat today and for the work that you are doing. We look 

forward to hearing more about your findings and things that can be done to prevent officer suicide, and 

to save lives.

Violanti

12:42

Well, thanks. Thanks for having me.

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12:45

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13:41

The opinions contained herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official 

position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. References to specific agencies, companies, 

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of Justice. Rather, the references are illustrations to supplement discussion of the issues.